Mini Motorways Reviews
From the moment I started Mini Motorways on the Nintendo Switch, I had a nagging thought of familiarity in the back of my mind. A scratching déjà vu sensation like I had been here before. When I did some research, I quelled that feeling and realised I had played the developer Dinosaur Polo Club’s previous outing Mini Metro on my phone. They both feel similar and the mechanics are very much aligned. Phew, I am not going mad!
Mini Motorways may seem like a simple game made for shorter sessions but the level of challenge and its growing complexity mean that it packs enough for many, many hours of entangled engagement with its gameplay mechanics. The audiovisual environment is minimalistic but suits the gameplay quite well while players find themselves more and more enraptured by the expanding cities they will have to connect in order to prevent chaos from spreading across the roads.
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Good puzzle games make you see the pathways in your mind before they show up in the game. Mini Motorways does this, and does it well. At its heart, Mini Motorways is about failure. Or your attempt to push failure back as long as possible, just like my parents' marriage. Eventually your city will collapse under its own pressure. But if you need a half hour to kill Mini Motorways is a great choice.
Mini Motorways is an enjoyable and often beautiful puzzler, but the lack of long term replayability makes it harder to recommend over its already excellent predecessor.
The team at Dinosaur Polo Club clearly has a knack for creating stripped-down but beautiful graphics and for simplifying mechanics down to their essence, which is a clear strength for a title that aims for success on mobile devices. But in order to make Mini Motorways engaging on other platforms, they needed to introduce a new mechanic or a new way to tackle the traffic challenge to add to the depth of the experience.
Featuring a decent number of cities and nice combinations of challenges, Mini Motorways is great when you are craving short bursts of puzzles as dynamic as the road traffic. This strategy simulation game is addicting and a half-an-hour session can easily stretch to a few hours as you attempt to “beat the traffic” and inch closer to yet another high score with “just one more try”. Its soundscape, like the vrooms and ticking of the changing traffic lights, is surprisingly relaxing and adds much intriguing flavor to the sleek minimalistic menu screens. While I do not feel particularly compelled to return to the game regularly for its daily or weekly challenges, my trips to the 14 cities were certainly fun while they lasted.
The Apple Arcade classic comes to PC and is as glorious as ever.
Mini Motorways is a relaxing game that’s ideal for those gaming sessions where you don’t want to think too much. Simple premise but highly addictive. This is a game about controlling traffic, only you won’t get hot and bothered like the real thing. Accessible and entertaining for everyone.
Mini Motorways is in many, well, ways, a terrific, truly addictive pick-up-and-play game for the Switch. Its fast-paced level structure and simplicity are incredibly well conceived and feel great to come back to time and time again. I’ve always been a big fan of management games in this style like Air Control, so having a spin like this to the formula is definitely up my wheelhouse and you’d be remiss not to at least give it a look.